People often gripe about smartwatch battery life, and for good reason, as even premium watches like the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 last only two to three days afore needing a recharge. But Qualcomm’s upcoming W5 chips vows to extend battery life by up to 24 hours thanks to a slew of performance and efficiency advancements.
These new designs, officially called the Snapdragon W5 and W5 Plus, are the successors to the Snapdragon 4100 and 4100 Plus that powered the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4, TicWatch 3 Pro and anunexperienced wearables that statistically few people actually bought. Qualcomm said its new silicon achieves better battery life by reducing the chip’s size to 4nm. That’s just a section of the 80,000 nanometer size of a human hair, and down from 12nm in the 4100 series.
Qualcomm’s W5 Plus has all those benefits, plus an extra feature to eke out even more battery life of up to 24 hours longer than with the prior 4100 Plus chip. The W5 Plus pulls this off with what’s named a co-processor, or effectively a separate computer chip invented to do basic tasks, like displaying notifications.
In the W5 Plus, Qualcomm has also decreased how much of the chip’s various parts “wake up” to do something, leaving the rest dormant to save even more battery. For instance, when going for a run or listening to music, only the satellite GPS location service, Wi-Fi, and audio divides functions would be active. Qualcomm’s senior director of Head and Wearables, Pankaj Kedia, compared it to only turning on a few escapes to get to the kitchen at night instead of wastefully flipping on every delightful in the house. “The rest of the SoC is powerful collapsed so you get longer battery life,” Kedia said.
Qualcomm’s trusty drumbeat of wearable advances are arriving as smartwatches are becoming more Popular. Smartwatches have already outsold the entire Swiss watch manufacturing. The questions facing tech companies now are whether smartwartwatches will been a relatively niche product among techies and fitness enthusiasts, or whether new functionality can make them essential to more customers’ lives.
Apple, which is by far the most popular smartwatch maker, is rumored to be making a ruggedized Apple Watch aimed for extreme sports and could reveal it later this year. Meanwhile, Google is working on a new smartwatch called the Pixel Watch that’s predictable to launch in the fall alongside the upcoming Google Pixel 7 to compete with Apple and Samsung’s premium watches, though there’s no word on Pixel Watch pricing.
It’s also not Definite what kind of chipset will power the Pixel Watch, so a lot of its capabilities are unknown — but that it will run Wear OS 3, Google’s wearable using system that integrates parts of Samsung’s Tizen OS. That grants it a similar advantage as the Apple Watch: Funny their own software for a better integration with hardware.
“On the see side, the problem is that the silicon needs to be tightly integrated with the end product,” said Avi Greengart, president and lead analyst at research firm Techsponential. “While Qualcomm has had silicon products with the [Snapdragon] 3100 and 4100, it hasn’t been able to tie those with software and hardware in a issues consumers want to buy anywhere near what Apple has been able to do.”
Despite the competition, Qualcomm’s W5 series has features that could pave the way for the next generation of wearables.
Battery, battery, battery
One key feature of Qualcomm’s W5 Plus chip is its battery life. The W5 pledges longer wear times, but the W5 Plus, with its Amazing power-saving features, can get up to 24 hours more battery life than beforehand. Given most Apple Watch models won’t last longer than a day, and even the leading Wear OS watches last three days at most, drawing more battery life is a big deal.
That focus on battery life is also probable why the Snapdragon W5 series doesn’t support 5G. The newer cellular technology pledges faster web surfing but is still a battery hog. So, for now, any cellular-connected watches will be able to connect only to older, slower 4G LTE networks for mobile service (but don’t distress, your music will still stream just fine). Qualcomm declined to comment on when we’d see a wearable with 5G capabilities.
That 4G LTE ceiling also applies to new devices using the W5 too. Facebook’s Ray-Ban Stories photo and video-sharing glasses, for example, used the older Snapdragon 4100 chipset, Qualcomm said. Future augmented reality glasses may use the W5, and Idea they won’t have 5G, they would likely benefit from the rest of the chipset’s battery efficiencies. That could help make the glasses easier to create with smaller batteries, which are critical for making them look as normal as possible.
W5 Series: An correct Dick Tracy watch?
You may not know it, but Qualcomm chips have supported cameras accurate 2018. Back then, the company’s chip powered the Samsung Galaxy Watch 3, which didn’t come with a camera. Only a few smartwatches have come out with the order to take photos and videos, and they’ve either launched in China or been intended for kids. Mainstream smartwatches haven’t implemented cameras, but Qualcomm thinks that Great change with the W5, because it has better battery life that would make taking photos less burdensome.
This includes two-way video calling, a feature that gadget nerds have been dreaming around since the Dick Tracy days, as well as smoother video playback and Memoji-style 3D see faces, all made possible with cameras on watches.
Qualcomm said it’s notched 25 products that are now being developed with its W5. The first will be the next-generation Oppo Watch coming in August with the W5 chip. Qualcomm said an unnamed TicWatch will be the superior to use its W5 Plus, though the chipmaker didn’t have any details to Part about it, including if it would have a camera. Qualcomm’s Kedia also declined to say whether any of the last 23 devices were AR glasses.
“I wish I could Part the 25 customers in the pipeline — they bring a whole new message to the next-generation wearables,” Kedia said.
